Hi guys! New build I’ve been messing with to show you. It’s a pretty good kit for 1/72 and nothing at all like that last 1/72 aircraft I built (Testors/Hawk F4U-1 Corsair). This one is going together like a charm except for one minor spot, but you’ll see that in a minute.
First impressions of this kit are that it has to be a re-boxing of a Hasegawa kit. All of the clues in the box support this theory (someone correct me if I’m wrong).
The details are not very defined for this scale as I have seen better, but this isn’t bad, and a good platform for one of my favorite parts - Scratchbuilding. I started on step one and added improvements as I went. Adding the throttle quadrant, trim wheel, seatbelts, canopy crank handle, Oxygen bottle and fire extinguisher (adds color), and a bunch of odd greeblies around the pit floor to fill up the negative space with something that looks more functional and busy.
I detailed the map holder on the right side of the pit after painting. It just needed more detail on this side.
All of the knobs were simple made from drops of thick paint built up in layers till they took the right shape.
A reminder of the scale.
The only thing I forgot to do here was to use a silver pencil to trim the gauges just to make them pop a little bit more. The yellow circle on the right side of the panel is actually a knob on a lever. After the panel was installed the knob got lost behind the flap lever and you really have to move around at odd angles to even see it. I could’ve left that out.
And then this is the part that gave me a touch of trouble. The wing roots, where the connect behind the pit, under the plane needed some filling. Since I want to rescribe these panel lines back in I’m using bits of stretched sprue instead of my usual Bondo.
Now that I’ve added all of that fine, micro detail. I want to show it off, right? Well in typical Hasegawa-like fashion the canopy, though well fitted and quite clear, is too thick to display it open. So after thinking on it overnight I woke with a fairly good idea. I have some different types of clear acetate to work with and some of them are thicker than others.
The first one I tried was a perfect thickness.
The first step was to take the original canopy and cover it with masking tape. I then trimmed the masking tape to the canopy edges so I have a copy of the canopy’s shape. I applied it to the acetate and cut it out very carefully with a sharp pair of scissors. Now the next step was one that most of us are familiar with; heat bending. I heated up a small pot of water to boiling and let it cool down to a simmer.
But there was a problem. The acetate not only did not want to bend correctly, but fogged from the heat application. I tried polishing it afterwards but that didn’t work as this particular acetate is made in layers.
So on to the next sheet of scrap plastic. A paper thin sheet I found somewhere and not my first choice. This time however, I decided after cutting out the shape to tape it over the original part and heat shape it very carefully with a lighter. Using the tape as a barrier this method actually worked. [proplr]
Because this acetate is so much thinner it is still flexible so care is needed to make sure it doesn’t get bent out of shape.
I then took the masking tape off of the new canopy and did some careful measurements to make the frame masking.
I primed it with Rustoleum clear Matte (to seal around the tape edges) and then Krylon Camouflage pea green (closest to interior green in a can I have) and to make sure it has a positive connection to the model later, I added some stretched sprue railings that fit into the rail guides on the side of the fuselage. Later after I remove the temporary canopy mask I will add the rest of the track rails to pit sides. It’ll look a lot better than the flat slabs that are there now to accomodate the original canopy piece and it’ll set the pit sides to a more accurate height.
I taped up the clear parts to use as a mask so I don’t have to worry about getting any paint in the pit, but quickly found out the rear window “bars” are far too thick to let the new canopy slide over them. Seriously, they are almost a millimeter in thickness, which stick out very far from the model. I sanded those down til they met the level of the masking tape and all is well. They are now flush with the fuselage sides.
^ This is the “before” shot where you can see those frame bars and how far they stick out. If they had done this for all of the window frames it would have made masking the front windscreen much simpler. Because once the masking was done sanding down the frame bars was easy on the rear windows. I’ll have to add the windscreen framing later by hand as the lines are very feignt and not easily seen. [I] Oh, maybe I’ll try clear scotch tape! That might work!
So that’s where I managed to get before this weekend. I’ve got more work to do on the wing roots before moving on to the rest of the model but it’s all going together quite well. This one is actually easy.
Thanks for looking! Have a great weekend. 
Thank you!
